Sustainability

ECHO circular portfolio

ECHOing Your Sustainability Ambitions, with no compromise on performance.

ECHO portfolio empowers the ambition towards a carbon-neutral future. This comprehensive selection of sustainable solutions is engineered with bio-based, recycled, and mass balance certified raw materials. Delivering a performance equivalent to their originating counterparts, ECHO technologies provide high-quality, sustainable alternatives to reduce the industry’s environmental impact.

Sustainability and circularity are at the core of how we design our technologies, manufacture our products, and ultimately work with our customers to reduce both our and their carbon footprints.
The two main levers to achieve this goal are feedstock sourcing (scope 3) and manufacturing processes (scopes 1 and 2).

Sustainable Feedstock Sourcing

ECHO Bio-Based Solutions: Creating Eco-Efficient Alternatives

ECHO bio-based resins are designed to seamlessly merge sustainability and performance. This selection of high-quality materials aims to integrate bio-based content into our resins utilizing feedstock from non-edible and non-food competing crop production. Amodel® PPA Bios is a partially bio-based long-chain PPA with bio-based content and produced using 100% renewable electricity. It has a low GWP and it’s available in structural, electrification, and flame retardant grades, offering eco-efficient alternatives without compromising performance.

ECHO Mass Balance Certified Solutions: Upholding a Sustainable Balance

ECHO mass balance certified materials are a testament to our commitment to sustainability.

The MB concept according to the ISCC PLUS principles has become a globally acknowledged industry standard that provides a defined set of rules for tracking and tracing the sustainability share of circular and/or renewable feedstocks in materials and end products, thus contributing to responsible sourcing and to the transition to a circular economy. Our mass balanced specialty polymers exhibit the same exceptional performance as their conventional counterparts while reducing reliance on finite resources.
Our Udel® PSU ECHO RP and Radel® PPSU ECHO RP are the first ISCC-PLUS mass balance compliant sulfone materials in the market and commercially available worldwide. Other certified bio-circular polymers include grades of Ryton® PPS ECHO RP.

ECHO Recycled Solutions: Empowering Supply-Chain Circularity

Echo recycled solutions utilize post-industrial and post-consumer recycled monomers, polymers, and/or fillers to formulate high-quality products, reducing environmental impact without sacrificing performance. As examples, our Omnix® HPPA ReCycle is a unique compound family based on a minimum of 33% recycled content, while our Amodel® ECHO RF portfolio is available with up to 50% recycled content and Ryton® ECHO RF with up to 40% recycled content.
We are also partnering with value chain players and developing technologies to increase circularity of our products. We are partnering with Mitsubishi Chemical Advanced Materials (MCAM) to recycle medical equipment made using Solvay’s UdelⓇ high-performance polysulfone (PSU) thermoplastic which will be recycled at the end of their useful lives. We also teamed up with French start-up Ostium in a joint project designed to enable the mechanical recycling of end-of-life single-use surgical instruments molded in glass-fiber reinforced Ixef® polyarylamide (PARA) from Solvay’s portfolio of specialty polymers.

Sustainable Manufacturing Processes

We take the need to decarbonize our products seriously. We have an objective to reduce by 30% our GHG emissions scopes 1 and 2 and to reduce our scope 3 emissions by 24%, compared to baseline 2018. The energy transition in our plants is accelerating and many of our products are already made using 100% renewable electricity. We are continuously launching new initiatives to source renewable energy, reduce the freshwater intake and the generation of non-sustainable industrial waste in all our manufacturing plants.